This column will change your life

Something I've had to learn to accept, as I wander the world of self-help, is an awful lot of people telling me to practise "the art of acceptance". Most books on self-improvement, of course, preach the opposite: they're about How To Transform Your Whole Life Completely Right Now. But a sizeable minority urge you to love your life, or your job, or the fact that you're single; they claim to tell you how to "want what you have". I've always bristled at this, mostly because it smacks of resignation - should you "accept" being in an abusive relationship, or the destruction of the planet? (Other times, it seems like an excuse for self-indulgence: should you "accept" the fact that you drink too much, or treat others like dirt?) Maybe it's preferable to work in a sweatshop and not mind, rather than to work there in a boiling rage. But most of us wouldn't want to accept that fate at all. One book on acceptance, the bestselling "business parable" Who Moved My Cheese?, urges employees to embrace the era of layoffs and longer hours. Accept your lot - it's such perfect management propaganda that some firms bought a copy for every worker.

It was the title of Tara Brach's book Radical Acceptance that made me think there might be something more to acceptance than this. Brach is no doormat: when she believed the US was launching an illegitimate war in 2003, she didn't complain at dinner parties; she protested at the White House, and was arrested and briefly jailed. "Many people do use the notion of acceptance as passivity, and underneath that passivity there's an unwillingness to respond to life," she told me. But real acceptance isn't about convincing yourself that something is good when it's bad. It's about fully acknowledging that what's happening is happening - "accepting the realness of what's here", which includes, crucially, your negative feelings about it. Accepting a situation "doesn't mean you like it or say it's OK," writes the psychologist Robert Leahy. "It means you know it is what it is, and that is where you start from."

That might sound like a cop-out. Most of us aren't delusional: we already accept that what's happening is happening. But, in fact, there's mounting experimental evidence that we go to enormous lengths to avoid confronting, psychologically, what we dislike about our lives. Our negative thoughts about our situation cause us emotional discomfort, so we try to stamp out the thoughts ("positive thinking"), or we just rail against them; we think we shouldn't be feeling bad. We try to deny how things are, and how we feel.

Looked at like this, accepting things doesn't mean putting up with them; indeed, it seems to be a precondition for real change. In one university study, for example, diabetics taught to acknowledge their negative feelings about their condition managed to stabilise their glucose levels. "The curious paradox," as Carl Rogers put it, "is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."